In my second year I was heavily involved with the Students’ Union and became Entertainments Officer, booking bands and DJs. I was always listening to music on my Walkman and would sing walking along the corridor between courses. Word spread that I could hold a tune, so I started getting offers to sing. A student jazz pianist asked me to sing jazz standards so he could practise his piano, and we would rehearse in a hall on campus. After a solid year of bugging from a guitarist friend, I also joined a covers band, a jazz/soul septet we named JASS. We practised with lesser-known songs like ‘Blind’ by Talking Heads, Rufus and Chaka Khan’s ‘Stop On By’ and Hue and Cry’s version of Prince’s ‘Kiss’.

The pianist tapped out the first few intro notes, the whole room was quiet, expectant. I was so nervous I sang the first four lines really badly and everyone went back to their conversations. I knew I’d lost the room. I felt I had captured the crowd’s attention with my look and now I was sure they were thinking, She looks good but she can’t sing. I took a deep breath – I knew I could do better. I had to get the room back. So I closed my eyes and just went for it, and sang like I’d never sung before. At the end I got a standing, cheering ovation. It was my A Star Is Born moment, like a Disney movie on steroids.

Our equipment was ruined. We didn’t know if we could go onstage, and thought it was all over. But then the most beautiful thing happened: every crew member from every other band brought all their towels and blankets, anything they could find, and stretched them out in the field backstage. Then they all proceeded to dismantle our entire production – lights, speakers, amplifiers, instruments, flight cases, amps – they even took the valves out of the guitar. All of our gear was spread out to dry. It took up a whole field behind the stage.

It was a clear sunny day, so everything gradually dried out. Then, all of those wonderful, beautiful human beings put our stuff back together again, and we did the gig. It was one of those moments when people pulled together and helped us, so that we could carry on and play in memory of everyone who had died. We could not have played without them, and it’s one of the most special memories of all my years of touring. It makes me emotional just thinking about it. Reminds you of how much love there is in our rock community.

The best gigs are where something unique happens. Once, during our 2019 tour, I was thinking, Why is there a big gap in the audience? All of a sudden, out of the gap, bursting like a volcano, comes a guy in a wheelchair, beaming with joy and held aloft by about six people. Everyone went ballistic while I walked across the hands of the audience to him, and they held me up while I sang right into his face. A similar thing happened two gigs later, except this time it was a ten-year-old girl, sitting on her father’s shoulders. We screamed every word of the lyrics at each other, eyeball to eyeball, straight into the mic, both of us loving every second.

It was the song that was playing when I had my sudden moment of clarity in South Shields. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being a musician. Those dreams had taken many forms: sometimes I was Little Richard, sometimes Jerry Lee Lewis, sometimes Ray Charles. But whatever form they had taken, none of them had involved standing onstage in a supper club outside of Newcastle, not playing a Vox Continental organ, while Long John Baldry alternately crooned to the accompaniment of a tape recorder and angrily threatened to fine members of the audience fifty pounds. And yet, here I was. Much as I loved John, I had to do something else.